Maintaining frequent backups of your discussion board is very important. In the event that your server's hard disk fails, hackers gain entrance to your server, or files become corrupted for any reason, if you do not have a backup of your board, you will lose some or all of your data. It is for this reason that Discus Pro integrates a backup and restore utility, and that DiscusWare strongly encourages you to use it often.

1. Make backups frequently: If ever data is lost and you need to restore from a backup, your board will revert to where it was when your last backup was taken. If you only take backups every month, you could lose up to a month's worth of data. DiscusWare recommends daily backups.

2. Transfer backups off the server: Keeping your backups in the Discus "backups" directory protects you against file corruption. However, this does not protect you against hard disk failure (if the hard disk fails that contains both the board and the backups, all is still lost). The "Download" icon allows you to transfer the backups to your own computer. It is strongly recommended that your backups be copied off the server.

3. Keep backups off site: If you run your own server and you back up the files onto a machine that physically sits next to your server or onto a different hard drive on the same server, and disaster strikes the site where your information is stored, all is still lost. Transferring your backups onto removable media and transporting them off site, or backing up the data over a network to machines off your site, are generally good strategies to employ, both with your Discus data and your other data.

DiscusWare recommends that you also check with your web host to see what their backup strategy is. Web hosts should be keeping daily backups of all data on their web servers, and frequently transferring this data off-site.

Unfortunately, DiscusWare receives reports all too often from customers of web hosts who said that they were keeping backups, but when something went wrong with the hard drive, it was discovered the hard way that the web host was not keeping the backups that they advertised. While we would hope that most web hosts will be more rigorous than this in safeguarding their customers' data, take it upon yourself to keep your own set of backups as well. If you ever are unfortunate enough to experience some kind of disaster, you will quickly realize that there is no such thing as too many backups!